A Review of John Amen's At the Threshold of Alchemy

The Sacramento Poetry Center presents John Amen and Scott Weiss on Monday Oct. 5, at 7:30 PM. John Amen is the founder of the online literary journal The Pedestal, which was the first to publish and pay me for the first short story in what I am now calling the Mukoma series. That story is entitled "Mukoma's Marriage" and an early version of it can be read at The Pedestal Magazine.

I am happy that John will be in Sacramento, although I cannot attend the event due to a schedule conflict. I, however, would like to talk briefly about his latest poetry collection, At the Threshold of Alchemy, which I was reading earlier today. First, you need to know that John Amen takes his poetry seriously, like all poets do, of course, but he goes above and beyond in terms of promotion. He is currently on a national tour, visiting several major cities. And he has reason to; his new collection is spellbinding.

John Amen has been described as "brutally realistic", a poet who "flexes verbal muscles", pursuing a "relentless path through memory and dreamscape". These are the great words from the blurbs, but let's enter the book now.

The first piece is entitled "Purpose". Here the persona is upfront with us: we are told that he or she "is in love with what pulses beneath blush and bone". What a strong message about the observant eye of the poet, one that cannot be deceived by pretense, surface impressions wouldn't just cut it—the poet goes for the underlying, delicate truth of every situation. That's a purpose, defined. We cannot, therefore, be shocked when the persona tells us: "everyday, without fail, I must lick the divine". Not sniffing, not squinting at. Licking; that's how close the incisive eye of the poet gets to the "pulse".

In "Triptych", there are some little amazing lines like: "It's tragic, / how someone's pain can become chronic noise, a schick / you learn to tune out". This questions the feeling we call compassion, the length of time it can stay without burning itself out, given sometimes the weight it often is asked to carry on its shoulders. Surprisingly, it outlasts the burdens it faces, and life becomes possible again.

Some of the poems tell stories (the persona's life), sometimes they bury them (lost relatives, friends), but in both cases, what's confirmed or dodged is memory. In an effort to remember loss and pain, the persona of "Burying the Story" concludes, "people / do in fact change; you forgive, even forget; life does indeed go on." Notice how prosaic this sounds; yes, the whole piece straddles prose poem/flash fiction, and to tell you the truth, the poem's form paled in the face of the brutally realistic message. This volume reads like a book of memories, and as the persona remembers, we are forced to remember too, to remember love and loss in order to gain.

I like the piece entitled "Between", where I am told that "Shame is the chair the monkey sits in" by a persona who forgets, sometimes, that he is blind, and walks around "worshipping eggs and static". What frail reality, what vulnerability! But, remember, it's in this delicacy, and in the static, with all its inconveniences, that a form of truth might be hiding, as long as we remember what we were told in "Purpose".

You read the poems and you nod at the arrival of each little revelation, but along the way, you are slightly scared, what with the helplessness that our very humanity faces. One persona says his "guts [are] on the rotisserie of blame", another wants to know when "the hand of man" became "synonymous with destruction". Perhaps that happens every time the Minotaur seeks to feed on our ambition, as the persona of "History" tells us.

A strength, as well as an inspiration, in this poetry is the persona's willingness to strip himself of all sense of importance, that realization that in value there is also valuelessness, but that, okay, that does not really matter, you pursue your purpose nevertheless. The persona of the last poem, "Afterwards", even says: "After thirty years of arguing with ash, / I've finally befriended failure", and that the initial purpose, that strong goal statement in the first poem, has experienced collapse: "Finally, dear comrades, this leads nowhere."

But these are not poems of despair; otherwise we would all give up after experiencing Hamlet. There is a transformative power borne out of the many realizations to which each piece is a window. The greater awareness you get of what might have posed as obvious leads to a kind of change, a change for the better, if not by inspiration, then through the bits of understanding, the whiffs of wisdom the lines contain. If these poems will not capture you at first (because later they do), you will enjoy the unique, surreal imagery, and the story of one persona who has dreamed and dared to live.